Opera Customization Returning?

I have been using Opear for 15 years and have always recommended it to everyone I know, however, I hate Opera since version 12.17 as the core things with customization are now gone. I dislike tabs at the top, liked the option to place downloads, status bar, bookmarks, main, address bar, navigation all where I wanted to on the screen. I also dislike how masking the browser for specific sites no longer is an option. I keep trying different versions and still through 27 I hate them all. I see that more and more sites are causing issues because I"m using such an old version of a browser but won't upgrade as long as its not longer customizable. I'm wondering if there are plans to return that fucntionality or if I should just give up now and switch to a different browser.

Some simple customisation options may return, but I very much doubt that we will ever again see any browser that is as customisable as Opera 12.
Sadly it was fantastic for those of us, including me, who wanted to use the options to their full advantage, but I suspect that very few people did much beyond perhaps trying different skins.
That being so, it's just not worth building that sort of flexibility, and therefore complexity, into a new browser now.
Sad but true.

Vivaldi is on the trajectory of becoming a customizable Chromium-based browser, and aren't Maxthon and Avant already ones?

My issue with Vivaldi is, although it has quite a few features already, they've given themselves a lot to do to clean up the extremely buggy technical preview. I can't see it becoming a stable version any time soon. Even though Opera may not have a lot of customisability and features, it is pretty stable (and usable imo). We will have to wait and see whether the 'slow' approach or the 'do-it-all-at-once' approach proves more effective.

That being so, it's just not worth building that sort of flexibility, and therefore complexity, into a new browser now.
Sad but true.

That's true enough. The most popular browsers used seem to prove that a simple interface will always win and full customisability will only be wanted by a minority.

Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm merely saying with the amount of features they've implemented, they've given themselves a lot of work to do which will have an impact on the time needed to get to the stable stage. This however doesn't stop people posting on the Opera blogs saying Vivaldi will be properly up and running in no time.